


The Sting; or: Seriously, Dude, Listen to Your Aitita, Don't Dig Up Stuff People Buried for a Reason

by parsnips (trifles)



Series: GHOST COPS [2]
Category: Glee, Salt and Silver - Anna Katherine
Genre: Badass, Explanations, Folklore, Gen, Original Character(s), POV Character of Color, POV Original Character, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-20
Updated: 2013-11-20
Packaged: 2018-01-02 03:30:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1052004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trifles/pseuds/parsnips
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What do McKinley High's supernatural defenders look like to a scared, outside perspective with a locker full of tiny "helpers" that might destroy everything in sight if he can't figure out how to pacify them?</p><p>The continuing adventures of Blaine and Sam: GHOST COPS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sting; or: Seriously, Dude, Listen to Your Aitita, Don't Dig Up Stuff People Buried for a Reason

**Author's Note:**

> The crossover is with an otherwise unficced urban fantasy novel, and no knowledge of that universe is necessary to read this fic. I'm just borrowing the set dressing.

Misha Elkano stared worriedly into his locker.

The  _things,_  none of them bigger than his thumb and all of them dressed in rough red cloth, were milling around the bottom of the locker, working like a giant hivemind to beat levels of Candy Crush on his smartphone. The game had made a pretty good distraction for them for the first couple of hours of the school day, but then they’d started getting into the levels that required a credit card to continue, and. Shit.

He had an emergency card tied to his mom’s. Any charge they racked up on one shitty game would be nothing compared to the damage they’d already done.

He’d ended up asking them to do all his homework for the next month just to distract them while he keyed in the card number. By the time he’d clicked  _'enter'_  they’d finished every fucking paper he had, left notes in strange block writing folded into all his books, and had progressed to ripping the metal off the back of the locker for lack of any further work to do.

The things… they were supposed to be helpers. But they had these tiny black eyes that just looked at him when he’d told them to stop fucking up his locker, waiting for him to give another order. Their fingers had twitched against their red clothes, staccato beats coming faster and faster until he’d shoved the phone back among them and told them to finish beating the game.

He closed the door carefully on the undulating mass of red-suited figures, took a deep breath, and turned to head toward gym class—

And ran straight into a tall blond football player who was, somehow, two inches away from Misha’s fucking  _face._

The blond asshole didn’t step back or anything, just smiled way too cheerfully. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Sam.”

"Sure," Misha muttered, trying to move around the guy. Before he could take more than a step, though, the football player hitched his backpack higher on his shoulder and tilted his head down to whisper.

"So, uh," the player said, eyes darting nervously around, "I hear you have some cheat sheets?"

"Oh," Misha said, and took it all back, this Sam guy was his best friend in the entire world if it meant he’d actually buy one of the little helper shits. "I mean, yeah, sort of." Misha leaned back against his locker and tried to look as casual as possible. Behind him, he could feel the knock of tiny bodies hitting the locker door. "Any subject you want, sure, I got something."

Sam rubbed the back of his head and smiled sheepishly. “I wish I had a cheat sheet for everything, but, I mean, maybe geometry?”

Misha nodded, maybe too quickly. He had to play it cooler than this, fuck. “Geometry, yeah, no problem. How’d you hear about me?”

"Around," Sam said, a little vaguely. "Heard that maybe there was a guy who knew a way to get all the right answers to any test, any piece of homework, in any subject. Has to be cheat sheets, right?"

"Better than that," Misha said, and he wasn’t going to cross his fingers, he wasn’t a  _five-year-old_ , he could tell any lie he wanted to whoever he wanted. “I’ve got something that can help you with your homework and your tests, for as long as you want, and no teacher is ever going to find out how.”

"Wow," Sam said, eyes wide. It looked ridiculous, actually, like kind of fake, but whatever, maybe he got hit in the head too many times. "How much would something like that cost?"

"Fifty bucks." Sam blinked, and Misha felt the tiny feet against his spine. Shit. "But that’s if you want one for every subject," Misha corrected quickly. "You said just geometry, right? That’s five bucks."

A loud  _bang,_  and something grey and sharp appeared in Misha’s peripheral vision. He slid sideways, looked at the thing suddenly beside his head. A dent, the size and shape of the corner of his phone, had been knocked into the metal. From the inside.

Misha looked at Sam. The football player smiled hopefully at him, which had to be a fucking miracle at this point. Misha tried to smile back. “For you, though,” he said, a little shaky, “two bucks. I’ll, uh, throw in some extra stuff.” Like  _seventy_  extras,  _Jesus._

When his grandfather had given him the helpers — okay, when his aitita had buried the box that held them in the backyard and made him promise to never dig them up, like  _seriously, never do it, Jesus niño, this is serious shit_  — he hadn’t known. He hadn’t realized. But the helpers knew his face now, knew they belonged to him. And after the shit they’d pulled back at his house, he had to find a way to get rid of them.

"Cool," Sam said, and then, like the worst infomercial in the world, like he’d taken  _classes_  on how to act that poorly, the asshole held up his hand and waved at somebody down the hall. “Oh, hey! It’s my friend! Hi! Hi, Blaine! How are you? Come on over, buddy, I’m talking about a thing! Over here! There’s  _stuff!”_

A shorter guy with a messenger bag jogged over, dark-haired, and Misha actually recognized this one. He sang sometimes on the quad. If the guy was planning to break into some kind of musical number in front of Misha’s locker, though, then this was probably going to go really fucking badly for everybody in the next few minutes.

The guy didn’t, though. His eyes were really wide, too, like maybe these two were on  _drugs_  or something, because he said, “Oh,  _hi,_  Sam! How’s it going? Hey, hi, nice to meet you, I’m Blaine.” Blaine waved a little and Misha couldn’t help it, he waved back. Blaine smiled brightly and turned to look at Sam. “So there’s  _stuff,_  huh? Wow,  _stuff._  Have you seen it yet? The stuff?”

"Nope," Sam said. "But he says that if I give him a couple of bucks I can  _have_  some stuff.”

There was a terrible cracking noise behind Misha, and a squeal that sounded like metal being tortured.

He should run. That was the probably the best option at this point, right? He’d dug up the box, he’d opened the box, the mass of tiny red-dressed things had swarmed out, and they’d said  _we will do things for you_ … His aitita would be pissed and disappointed and probably fucking terrified if he ever found out, and all Misha could do was stare at these two assholes who were just nodding wide-eyed at one another, talking like idiots and not even noticing that, Jesus Christ, the paint on Misha’s locker was starting to  _actually fucking melt._

The sounds were getting worse, and Misha could hear the things’ voices in his head, feel their eyes on him, their fingers scratching, and the bone-deep knowledge that he had nothing else to give them, nothing more for them to do, and they were going to punish him for it, like they had the phone and the locker, like they had his room and his house and  _fuck—_

And then someone dumped a fuckton of fucking  _sand_  on his head. Misha’s eyes closed automatically, but the shit got everywhere — between his lashes, in his ears, on his tongue.

"It’s salt, actually," came the slightly preppier voice of the Blaine kid. "We thought it might cut through whatever was talking to you. Keep your eyes closed for a second, okay?"

A pair of hands closed over Misha’s shoulders, taller than him, taller than Blaine, so it had to be Sam. “Dude. It’s cool,” the football player said. “We know you’ve got something nasty in your locker, okay? Not to be weird, but cheat sheets don’t usually strip paint. You just have to answer some questions first, just so we know what we’re dealing with, and then we’ll take care of everything.”

"Don’t worry," Blaine said from somewhere to Misha’s left, closer to the locker door than anyone with sense should really be. "We do this all the time."

"All the time," Sam repeated cheerfully. "Like, at least twice."

Shit, Misha was gonna  _die._

"So," said Blaine, "do you actually know what’s in the locker, or did you just come to school this morning and it started talking to you?"

"Never feed anything to a thing that shouldn’t have a mouth, dude," Sam said. "Pretty sure that was in Harry Potter."

"No," Misha said, fighting the urge to rub at his eyes. "It’s nothing. There’s nothing there."

The banging noises from the locker hadn’t stopped. He could hear the two boys sighing beside him, sounding tired and almost annoyed. Sam’s hands didn’t move from Misha’s shoulders, and this basically wasn’t the most convincing lie Misha had ever told.

He felt somebody come closer to him. Almost too close. “Listen,” said Blaine, very quietly, and it was earnest and it was heartfelt and it was scary as fuck because he didn’t know this guy, didn’t know him at all, and he suddenly wanted to hear every word he had to say. “Listen,” he said again, too soothingly, “there’s definitely something in your locker. If you don’t know what they are, then that’s awesome, but it makes our job a little more difficult, because it means they’re not going to listen to you.” Blaine paused. “If you do know, and you’ve seen them, and you’ve talked to them, and they know your face, then all you have to do is tell them to come out and get into this little red box I happen to have right here in my backpack, okay?”

"I don’t know," Misha gasped, "I don’t know what you’re talking about—" because he wasn’t crazy, and that’s what the helpers were, they were madness and fairytales and things no one could believe in, not even these fucking weird assholes.

—And suddenly Blaine’s voice was hard. “There’s no time for this, okay? Are you worried about this being real? It’s real! We’re going to believe you! We already believe you, and we know how to fix it! But they’ll only respond to your commands, so come on, man, let’s go.”

"Have the freakout after we scoop up the red dudes," Sam advised.

They were talking like it was going to be easy. Like this was just some ants at a picnic or, or anything normal at all. They didn’t fucking  _get_  it.

"I brought them," Misha said, and he couldn’t keep the shake from his voice, the taste of salt from his mouth. "My aitita — granddad, grandfather, he said to keep them in their box. They’re called helpers, but they. All the carpets in my house, they’re vacuumed down to nothing, and the walls are scrubbed to the plaster. They wrecked the furniture to clean it, and then they got rid of the fucking wreckage, and. They, the helpers, they won’t leave, they just want more orders, I can’t give them anymore, I told them to count to infinity while I brought them here to sell and when I opened my backpack they just looked at me and said  _What now?”_

He could still see those black eyes staring upward, small and alien. Knowing. Waiting.

These weren’t no fucking  _ants_.

"Awesome," Sam said, which was completely the wrong reaction to have. There was a pause, and then— "This is usually when we’d rock a power chord or something, but, uh, the only thing we really have prepared is ‘Basketcase’—"

Misha pulled away from Sam’s hands and glared up at him, eyes watering from the salt that filtered through his lashes. “ _Dude,”_  he said.

At some point, while Misha had had his eyes closed, Sam had slapped on a black, close-fitting baseball cap, because apparently what this whole situation really needed was a fucking style change. It made him look like a cheap-ass rent-a-cop, which didn’t exactly cut down on his total asshole points. Blaine was shaking his head and mouthing the word  _no_  at him, which, thanks for the support, except, oh, hey, he’d changed into a hat too, Misha felt super great about that.

Misha would have a lot more opinions about all of this, actually, except that then the locker door _exploded the fuck off the wall_  and suddenly there was nothing but noise and eyes and  _red_.

Things happened fast.

Sam spun backward, his fist slamming out to hit the nearby fire alarm. Lights starting flashing, the klaxon sounding on top of the sound of the helpers’ destruction, the doors at either end of the hallway slowly swinging shut against the flow of screaming students Blaine started herding through. There were strange symbols painted on the safety glass. They sparked a little when the two doors touched.

The helpers were smiling.

 _"Box."_  And now there was a box in his hands, a wood-shop reject, and Blaine was throwing handfuls of powders at the helpers, singing something, seriously,  _singing_  something, Sam was singing too, except he had a  _tire iron_  and he was fucking hitting the helpers out of the air like he was trying out for baseball next season. The box was in Misha’s hands,  _something was biting him,_  but why was the box in  _Misha’s hands_ —

Years ago. His aitita, tucking him in. He must’ve been five, tops. Misha thought there was monsters under the bed. His aitita just laughed a little, looked out the window, toward the backyard, and said, _You ever see monsters, niño, you just tell them to get back into their little box and go to sleep. Everybody needs to sleep until it’s time to wake up again._

There were sharp, small fingers digging into his skin, and Blaine was just swinging his bag now, all out of powders, and Sam had lost his tire iron, the lockers were being ripped down into strips of steel, the sound was terrible, the concrete was crumbling, the pipes like finger bones bending down through the walls, and the box was open in his hands, the little box, shit,  _shit_ —

"Get back," Misha said, more choke than words, but it was loud, too, even over the fighting and the klaxons, "get back in the box."

And just like that, the box was suddenly heavy in his hands. There was a silent, staring mass of eyes staring up at him, waiting.

Misha swallowed. His hand shook as he reached for the lid. “Go to sleep,” he said. “You need to sleep until it’s time to wake up again.” And he closed the box.

Nothing moved.

For the first time in days, he couldn’t feel anything watching him.

Overhead, the klaxons stopped, the pipes gave a groan, and, a bit anticlimactically, the sprinkler system sputtered and went off.

"Oh my  _god,”_  Blaine said, clutching his bag like it was a newborn baby. “Does Principal Figgins know how dirty the water in the emergency system is? And I’m pretty sure the water pressure is not actually up to code.”

"We should probably do, like, a class president thing about that, right?" Sam said, tugging a corner of Blaine’s bag through a gap in Blaine’s death-clutch. He dug his hand in and pulled out a roll of duct tape.

"Maybe? I mean," Blaine said, regathering his bag with a stern look and then reaching out with one hand to take the box from Misha’s nerveless fingers, "we could do a petition if we wanted to get the student body involved, but considering that the water is — wait, seriously? It’s already stopping? We can add ‘insufficient for actual fire prevention needs’ to the list, but I’m not sure anybody but us and the Young Civil Engineers of Tomorrow Club would actually care about it."

Sam shook water from the brim of his cap and unrolled a long stretch of duct tape. “So why aren’t they here throwing a shit fit about the hallway?”

"Annie Bernstein’s home sick today. I think the rest of the club is just a bunch of fake names supporting a shell corporation to hide her illicit student government money-laundering activities." Blaine settled his bag back against his side before holding the box out steady, two-handed, toward Sam. They looked at each other from under the brims of their baseball caps, and nodded.

"Illicit, huh?" Sam lined up the strip of duct tape along the edge of the box, loosened his shoulders, squared his feet, and then— swooped the tape around the box like it was the world’s shittiest Christmas wrapping contest.  _"Illicit."_

Blaine, following Sam’s movements, twisted the box over, around, upside-down, like there was nothing in there but air. “You know what illicit means. You used it correctly  _yesterday.”_

_"Laundering."_

"Oh my god, now you’re just being embarrassing." The box, thick and lopsided with tape, was a lump in Blaine’s hands. He waved Sam off and then ripped the end of the tape away, flattening the edge down before holding the box in the air to inspect it. There was a long pause.

Blaine said, “Look okay to you?”

Sam shrugged. “Sure. You want it?”

"Yeah, I’ve got space at home." Blaine shoved it into his bag. They both let out a breath, and then, as one took off their hats. Blaine smiled a little. "Hey, do you think they’re actually going to make us show up for Bio this period, or—"

And then the fuckers actually turned together and started to  _leave._  

Misha was wet, and he was cut, and he was pretty sure that his house and his mom’s credit score were royally  _fucked,_  and now these assholes were just walking into the sunset together like the world hadn’t absolutely changed forever.

"Hey,  _dicks,”_  he called, and the two douchenozzles stopped at the end of the hallway to look back at him. “Yeah,  _hi,_  shitheads. You maybe want to tell me what the  _fuck_  all that was?”

The two of them stared at him for a second. Sam had these eyes that looked like a goldfish trying to think too hard; he muttered something at Blaine, who maybe was secretly a brujo because he was a creepy little shit and  _one_  of them had to be.

Finally Blaine rifled through his bag, came up with his smartphone, and, after flicking it a few times, he stepped over the apocalyptic mess on the floor and held it up to Misha.

The web browser was open. It was a Wikipedia stub page labeled  _galtzagorriak._ There were all of maybe five sentences on it, and a single cartoon illustration in the sidebar that showed a group of red Smurf-like elves shilling for an old-timey Spanish cereal company. They looked, if Misha was drunk and high and maybe totally fucking blind, almost exactly  _nothing like_  the things in the box.

"We got a warning from a source," Blaine said. "It said—"

"She said," Sam interrupted.

 _"She_  said a lot of things, but we figured out this one pretty easily. Because,” he said, pointedly, over his shoulder, “she’s just a recurring, prophetic, semi-sentient manifestation—”

 _"Ghost."_  Sam gave Misha a bro-nod and a stupid grin. “Cheerleader of Locker 73, dude, you’ve heard of her, right?”

Misha didn’t even know what was happening anymore, but. “Wait. She’s real?”

Blaine rolled his eyes. “Mostly.” He dropped his hand, put his phone back in his bag, and then looked carefully at Misha. His expression reminded Misha of the sound of his voice, earlier — that earnest and heartfelt and so sincere voice that nobody should really have. That was what he looked like now, and that was why Misha wasn’t so sure he’d want to be in the same room as Blaine the brujo if given a choice.

Blaine said, “She told us there was somebody who was going to bring trouble here. Sam and I are in charge of making sure trouble doesn’t  _stay_  here. All this? This was an accident. Sometimes it’s not. It makes a difference.” He took a step back, without looking, and didn’t hit bit of debris. “You’re probably going to start noticing more stuff now, by the way. Sorry about that. It kind of comes with the territory. If anything looks really wrong, though, come find us and we’ll take care of it. It’s what we do.”

Blaine turned and hopped like a tiny, incongruous gazelle back over to Sam, and Misha wasn’t sure whether the last minute hadn’t been more fucking freaky than the last day and a half. He was going to skip the rest of the day and just lie low at the Orange Julius at the mall, seriously.

There was one thing, though. Just as the two of them were about to leave again, Misha called out, “What are you guys, anyway?”

Their hands on the double doors, they turned in unison, grinning, back toward Misha. “Us?” said Sam. He winked. “We’re the  _Ghost Cops.”_

And the two of them high-fived like  _assholes_  and slammed their way out the doors.

 

end


End file.
